hodwik2

>"If you want to change these laws, I suggest you get involved."

I've been considering campaigning for Donald Trump. Given his background, I think he may be the most likely president to push for the sort of anti-Zoning laws I'm interested in. Perhaps you're right.

>"Do you own real property?"

Yes, I own a home in a wealthy suburb just outside of Philadelphia. I am well aware of the growing pains this would cause. But that can't stop us, this is a human rights issue, as far as I am concerned.

People averse to low income and brown people moving to their nice little town will just weaponize those permit costs to block developers. By putting those infrastructure costs exclusively on the developer, you're basically taxing poverty, because those costs will all have to go on to the new poor residents.

We already have an income tax system, it spreads the burden well. If the city needs more taxes to pay for infrastructure they should raise their local income taxes.

There are currently huge methane leaks in multiple places in the US as we speak, that we've spent months trying to plug.

Why wouldn't increased methane use lead to increased methane mining and therefore more leaks? Are we honestly planning to trust the regulatory bodies to handle this when they've never shown any serious oversight ability in the past?

Look, I overreacted. In this case, evidently, mangeletti merely misspoke. However, it's common I hear this same complete lack of humanities education in all areas of technology. It is a growing concern of mine.

I'm not worried about "every little detail". I'm concerned with basic areas of human knowledge, foundational elements of a classical education.

I'm concerned that we're creating engineering-educated drones capable of industriously automating away our traditional roles, yet who haven't even had the proper post-Enlightenment education to understand the civilization in front of their eyes.

I would argue that this article posits a new, compelling filter.

If most species are large, and from small planets, they will have much stricter resource constraints than we did.

As a result, they are unlikely to have industrialized the way we did, as it would have depleted their resources too quickly. As a result, they are unlikely to be a silicon-age species.

Drawing from the author's biological/size argument, they're likely to have longer lifespans than we do, and considerably fewer births.

Given their resource constraints, and longer lifespans, they are likely to have strong communal systems of resource allocation, and are unlikely to have moved towards Capitalism.

Given their longer lifespans, they are probably more risk averse than our own species -- as willingness for an animal to die is strongly related to size and lifespan. This suggests they may be less war-faring than ourselves, and thus less likely to have nations.

Given their closer relationship with nature, due to their resource constraints, they're likely to have developed a Pagan system of thought, rather than a monotheistic theology.

As a result, they are unlikely to be motivated towards large infrastructural, imperial or technological projects as a result of: profit motive, national motive, or religious motive.

I'd argue then, that it is unlikely they have produced a civilization of significance.

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Long story short; local alien species are likely to be tribal, communist, non-technological, and environmentalist.

If through some strange force a species of this kind managed to become technologically advanced, they would likely look down on a species such as our own as a sort of vermin, because of our numbers, hunger and short lives.

LoraWan is inherently monolithic. There is only supposed to be one LoraWan provider, who acts as the router, and passes traffic to receiver according to their address -- just like a cell tower. You don't have a hundred cell towers, you have 3.

Baroque to Classical was not a rebellion, it was an embellishment and a refinement.

The art establishment's writing of art history as a series of rebellions is an ahistorical invention, designed to make the works of Rothko and Pollock seem the necessary end result in a progression of rebellions.

In reality, the majority of the new art movements came, to quote Jesus, "Not abolish the Law or the Prophets; but to fulfill them."

The art critic Fred Ross gave a great speech on this, in 2006, to the Oil Painters of America guild. You can listen to it here: http://audio.artrenewal.org/podcasts/FredRoss060520.mp3

Or the lattice is infinite in all directions, and is "pulled" against. So even as local objects want to fall into lattice, the fact that the network is infinite "pulls" the "space" away from the lattice.

So close together the lattice force works, but it is weak across long distances, in comparison to the pulling force of the rest of the lattice out towards infinity.

I really have no idea what I'm talking about.

At the very beginning of Zork you are wandering through the forest. At one point, after branching around for a while you hear a bird singing above.

If you say 'climb the tree' you read "You are about ten feet above the ground nestled among some large branches. The nearest branch above you is beyond your reach."

If you 'climb higher' you see "On the branch is a small birds nest. "

If you look in the nest, "In the bird's nest is a large egg encrusted with precious jewels, apparently scavenged somewhere by a childless songbird. The egg is covered with fine gold inlay and ornamented in lapis lazuli and mother-of-pearl. Unlike most eggs, this one is hinged and has a delicate looking clasp holding it closed. The egg appears extremely fragile."

If you open the egg roughly, "There is a golden clockwork canary nestled in the egg. It seems to have recently had a bad experience. The mountings for its jewel-like eyes are empty, and its silver beak is crumpled. Through a cracked crystal window below its left wing you can see the remains of intricate machinery. It is not clear what result winding it would have, as the mainspring appears sprung."

If you wind it, "There is an unpleasant grinding noise from inside the canary."

If you open the egg gently, "The canary chirps, slightly off key, an aria from a forgotten opera. From out of the greenery flies a lovely song bird. It perches on a limb just over your head and opens its beak to sing. As it does so, a beautiful brass bauble drops from its mouth, bounces off the top of your head, and lands glimmering in the grass. As the canary winds down, the song bird flies away."

When I found that as a 7 year old, sitting in the dark after everyone in my family had gone to bed, peering into the screen of my 286, I knew that text adventures are the only game worth making.

Right, yes, some of these features were added to various MUDs with some amount of success.

The big difference I'm arguing for is scope, and engineering.

If you have NPC chat bots that can learn, and an adjectives and typologies system for object, combine them so that chat bots can talk about objects adjectives and typologies. That sort of thing, really engineer the hell out of it.

In the end it would all be a massive NLP problem. As major advances in NLP happen the possibilities for MUDs is massive.

I would wager that if you're seeing data that makes the US look like we have greater income inequality you're looking at one of two things.

Possibility one -- you have good data, but you're looking at post-tax income data, which would be skewed because of our flatter tax structure, fewer transfers, low long-term capital gains tax rate, and our relatively high income tax as percentage of total tax burden.

Possibility two -- the Gini coefficient you're looking at took national rates and then averaged them, rather than actually comparing incomes of specific people across the EU.

I believe that if you compared pre-tax data across the EU (rather than national data, averaged) you would see the EU having considerably more income inequality.

Just speaking from first hand experience, I've seen the difference between the lives of the wealthy and poor in the US (from Connecticut to Mississippi), and the wealthy and poor in the EU (from Bulgaria to Norway). The difference is much starker in the EU.

I'm sure it probably doesn't sound very scientific, but I'm inclined to trust my own eyes over statistics. If the data shows otherwise, I have to imagine the data is skewed in some way.